Friday, December 10, 2010

Capcom To Live Stream Upcoming Titles Next Week

In news not relating to Mega Man (that we know of), the Capcom Unity crew will be live streaming footage of five upcoming games all next week:

"Next week, we've decided to stream five upcoming Capcom games (one for each day of the week) so that you folks can check out these titles in action! Tune in each day next week for a different game! We'll be playing each game for about an hour and we'll be sure to give you a heads up on which game will be featured by revealing a title each day." (see the above picture)

The identify of the five titles are currently shrouded in mystery, however chances of one of those being an upcoming Mega Man title, Mega Man Universe or maybe even Legends 3, seems pretty likely. Come to think of it, one of the mystery titles will be featured on December 17th, the same day as Mega Man's 23rd anniversary; perhaps we'll see something of interest around then..?

While I'm all for seeing Mega Man Legends 3 in action, I'm a tad more curious to see what's going on with Mega Man Universe, a game that hasn't received any attention since mid-September. I'm certain everything is okay development-wise (it hasn't been canceled, contrary to rumors), however it is puzzling to see it go off the grid after a slew of hype. Seeing the game after after all this time would be reassuring.

We'll just have to wait and see, I suppose! Let the speculation begin.

Mega Man Universe went off the radar likely because of the decidedly horrible reaction it got at Comic-Con, and rightly so. I can't even begin to list all the things that were wrong with that build. Hopefully things have gotten better since then. I know it would be too much to ask for Mega Man Universe to be turned into an entirely different game or project, but hopefully it's no longer something that's basically just making fun of the entire franchise.

Let's stop and think about this ok? They wouldn't announce a Mega Man 11, Mega Man 10 hasn't even been out for a full year yet. And they wouldn't announce a brand new "modern" X9 because Capcom has pretty much abandoned that after its lackluster performance the past several games (notice they're letting a random Korean company run with the franchise?). They wouldn't announce a "retro" X9 because it would backfire horribly with the fan base, so from Capcom's stand point they probably think "What's the point in doing more X games?".

So yeah, it's Legends 3 footage more than likely if it's even anything Mega Man related at all.

They wouldn't show MM11 now unless they're aiming to release it exactly one year after MM10, which would mean yearly releases (in which Classic fans bashing EXE/SF for that should be prepared to shoot themselves in the foot for hypocrisy if they do).

There's no way in hell X9 might ever exist, what with the poor reception the later X games got, not to mention the whole 'are they canon or not?' issue. One could use the Legends 3 argument, but even that took more than 10 years. Even more, I doubt there's any Capcom staff backing the possible creation of X9. X fans should look to Rockman Online.

I do disagree with him regarding Legends 3 at the moment, though. Almost everything I've seen over at Capcom Unity suggests that the game is still in the -really- early stages of development, to the point where I highly doubt they have any gameplay to showcase in the first place.

It's either Mega Man Universe, or a yet-to-be-announced Rockman title that can be quickly developed/had already been in development and is nearing its final stages, despite both IntiCreates (MMU) and the Legends/EXE/SF development team (Legends 3) having their hands full.

If it's a yet-to-be-announced title... Next March is EXE's 10th anniversary. It'd be a perfect time for an EXE collection, although I'd honestly rather have them wait on that until they're done with Legends 3. At that point, they should have a better idea on how to fully utilize the 3DS tech for the EXE collection.

I highly doubt they would announce a ZX3 or SSR4 now. ZX3, maybe.

SSR4, definitely not. SSR titles tend to be released in the Winter, and there's no way in hell that Capcom's going to announce it a full year in advance. Not to mention SSR3's ending as well. If they wanted to continue the SSR series, they could have easily done it last year instead of creating OSS. Plus, I highly, highly doubt the SSR series will be able to jump to a new handheld (3DS) and continue from there - Capcom's far more likely to create an entirely new Network timeline series.

(One could say SSR3's post-game scenario opens the door for future SSR games. I could argue that SSR3's post-game scenario also opens the door to an entirely new series taking place sometime between EXE and SSR. Sirius curiously mentions having met someone 100 years before the events of SSR3. Why would he even say this in the first place? There's a 200 year gap between EXE and SSR.

I wonder why the gap is specifically 200 years this time, anyways? Most series in the Robotics Timeline have a 100 year gap between each other, with the exception of the unspecified hundreds of years gap between Zero -> ZX, and the thousands of years gap between ZX -> Legends.)